


Someone to Watch Over You

by newcanaan



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, Some mentions of sex but nothing explicit, dissocation tw, implied self harm, major character deaths, this is only to cover my arse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:55:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28713120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newcanaan/pseuds/newcanaan
Summary: 'But Jamie’s mouth stopped her in her tracks. In her way of being, all Jamie had done since she walked without a word into that kitchen was make the drumming of Dani’s past cease. She had not thought until then that she had the heart still to allow people to surprise her. And her name had sounded whole when it came from Dani’s mouth.'Four times these two comforted each other, taking place around and after the events of the show, starting with the scene just after Flora is saved at the lake(aka yes i am starting another one but this will be limited to four chapters)
Relationships: Dani Clayton & Jamie
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	1. By the Lake

“You’re here,” she said. “You’re still here.”  
But Dani did not reach the ends of her arms. She was standing at the edge of the lake, where the water’s hands were around her ankles. Every nerve in her body was humming. She was there, inside herself, she knew that in the way she had been told since she was a child that the sky was blue but it looked an awful lot like black from where she was standing.

And she was not alone in there any more, was she? She might have insulated herself from the boundary of her skin – that kind of snowfall the brain promised to protect the body from the weight of a human heart – but it only pressed her closer to the bestial heat flush against her.  
She recalled speaking words she had never before known. She was Viola Willoughby. The year was 1680. She could speak French and played the piano in the sitting room. One summer in her teenage years her and her sister had hidden in the stables to try their father’s stock of absinthe. She was Danielle Clayton, Dani, Poppins. The year was 1987.  
“Poppins, can you hear me in there?” And she sounded so sincere.

Dani found her eyes at last. “It’s us.” The woman was still whispering, feverish, but her mismatched eyes had stilled. “It’s alright, it’s us.”

The gardener nodded, her expression searching, her eyebrows curled as she sought sense from Dani’s words.

“It’ us,” she agreed, in the end, the only thing that seemed to settle the au pair at all. “Okay? It’s us.”

Dani shook her head, her hands grasping at Jamie’s sleeves. Her Jamie, she recalled, who had come all the way out there looking for her. The one she had thought might have been her most important person – was that what they called it? The one with green eyes, who walked through the house as if she did not have a care in the world what the ghosts were up to.

“Let’s get you warmed up, yeah?” There was such a shared solitude in her eyes, such an offering of love that emanated out of her being without her consent, it could have broken Dani all over again.  
In the end she only collapsed into her hold.  
There were centuries of exhaustion inside of her. And consumption, too: not early on but in the stilted years that followed. Never a prognosis, of course, only some strand lining her lungs that worsened in the cold. Some days she would swear she had coughed up half her organs. It was only when it had gotten worse – truly, unmistakably worse – that she left blood in the sink. Dani never told Jamie of that.  
It would only further any harm, and she could not do that to her, not when she cared more for the gardener than she did for herself.

Jamie was holding her to her chest as if it might keep them from drowning. There was no heat returning to her body but the slick, merciless streak of a beast through her. Dani moaned in pain and swore it had left her branded.

“Flora?” she murmured against her shoulder.

And then she remembered the cry that had pierced the air, “Uncle Henry,” and he was holding the children like a keepsake.

“They’re safe, they’re alright. We need to get you back home now, alright?” She pulled Dani off her frame and took her hand. Her thumb ruminated over the back of her knuckles.

And the au pair followed her with her eyes mournfully blank. She was too far gone to have grief of her own.

I am home, she thought, and stopped in wonder at the thought. I am home, I am home, she thought; now to climb.  
Jamie was waiting for her on the other side. With her arm outstretched and ready to pull her to shore. She had a mark of her own on her shoulder. Yes, the gardener had known that lesson intimately. Something there, at the very least, that understood. She would not trail after her in sympathy; her gardener would sit by her on the bathroom floor on the nights she could not bear her reflection because it was where she chose to be.  
And despite it all, there was sympathy she had herself for the Lady of the Lake. What if nobody in her time had shown her such tenderness?  
Her eyes screwed shut against the cold.

The au pair found herself standing in her room. The back of her knees touched her bed. Her bed, she ran a hand over blanket, the first thing she had had that was really her own. But she had found more of those at Bly, had she not?

Jamie was rummaging through her drawers with all the patience she could manage. She felt a pang of embarrassment, wonderful and full and human, when she remembered the last time they had been in the room.  
An entire morning, her mind cleared almost at the thought, a whole lifetime ago. Under any other circumstance she felt certain that Jamie would have been bashful about going through them as she did, but some other instinct had overcome her that night.

What had the woman been doing before she came out there? Only an hour or two ago, was she reading on her settee, warm from the thought of their former night, watering the plants growing up her flat’s brickwork? She was standing in front of Dani with her eyes low.

“You alright, Poppins?” 

Dani nodded, and Jamie took her elbow gently. “Thank you.”

She held the nightgown out to her. “Did you want me to go or . . .”

Dani only looked at her with an awful colour in her eyes, as if she did not know how she was standing there. Jamie’s hands tightened on the cotton.

When she pulled at the bottom of her jumper she recalled it was the same one she had been wearing that day in the kitchen. Jamie had been teasing her something relentless about it, and Dani promised her that she could borrow it if she wanted. The woman did not know if she would ever hear that laugh again, lightening up the corners of the kitchen and the classroom. It felt hopelessly far away from them.

But the au pair offered no resistance and they managed to get it up over her head. Her jeans proved more of a challenge from the state they were in.  
Jamie was on her knees pulling off her shoes at the time, and Dani curled her hands over the edge of the bed on instinct. The gardener looked up at her.  
Memories of Dani burned over her skin, no doubt. She rose carefully to her feet. Her hands hovering over her cheeks, Jamie closed her eyes and kissed her once, on the temple. The love she felt from that contact almost dragged her to her knees. It was still too early, too uncertain, but she had sensed that Dani needed something there to be in that space with her.

“It’s us,” Dani whispered, like it was one of Flora’s secrets. “It’s you, it’s me . . .”

Her heart was echoing down the precipice of her chest. For a moment, Jamie had thought it had been her own presence that brought comfort to the au pair. Her eyes betrayed her though. It was not the gardener that she was talking to, but something Jamie could not bear witness to that had tangled itself irrevocably into her fate.  
Dani had spent her whole life seeking solitude, and now she would never have to be alone again.

But Jamie’s mouth stopped her in her tracks. In her way of being, all Jamie had done since she walked without a word into that kitchen was make the drumming of Dani’s past cease. She had not thought until then that she had the heart still to allow people to surprise her. And her name had sounded whole when it came from Dani’s mouth.

The two of them had found an innocence between the sheets the night before that they would never again have. But its memory, its green paradise, she still carried around with her like a bird in her hands.  
Dani was shivering in the one o’clock silver and the gardener remembered what it was they were doing there.

“Turn around,” she said. With the streak of a flush she met Jamie’s eyes, and she smiled, Jamie saw, she goddamn smiled when she recalled her asking Dani much the same not twenty four hours before. Even when she stood in pieces she made Jamie gasp with fresh life.  
Lungs blossoming, veins curling, all of it, the gardener swore, those things she had written off lifetimes before as being too far out of her reach. The woman shuddered beneath her.

Dani turned, mannequin-like and still dragging a body from the lake with her. Jamie took off her bra with steadier hands than she had the time before – and almost rolled her eyes at herself for such timing – and pulled back on her shoulder.  
The au pair turned.  
“Alright?” she asked, her eyes searching her porcelain face.  
Dani’s reply was a little empty but it assured Jamie she still needed her there. When she pulled her underwear down Dani managed to lift her feet one at a time. Her hand had settled on Jamie’s shoulder and at any other time she might have drawn her lips to her blessed palm.

Not a week before, Dani had been sat reading ‘The Princess Bride’ after the children were asleep. She had not seen Jamie catch her, but the way she flustered at every occasion the gardener dropped a much-assured ‘As you wish, Poppins,’ had been well worth the surprise.

In the room she stood completely bare. She could not remember a time she had felt so unconscious of her own body there. Those were not her hands anymore, she knew, she only resided inside of that flesh.  
Jamie drew the nightgown over her and moved her hair aside. The au pair’s ribcage was moving like a newborn’s on their first night of sleep.

“Come and get some rest,” Jamie whispered. Hand in hand, the three of them moved over to the bed. Jamie laid her down with a trace of adoration on her cheekbone. “Just close your eyes,” she told her. “You’re home now.”

Dani felt for the clothes she had thrown on; the sound Jamie made as she came crashing through the water – so lacking in fear of the lake dreaded by haunted children – was one she would not soon forget. “You’re wet.”

Jamie managed a smile. “What can I say, love, you just have that effect on me.”

Dani let out a huff of laughter, so true to herself she could not deny it.

“Need to go find Owen, but I’ll be back right after.”

Her eyes ran down the length of Jamie’s face, her perfect, ethereal outline. “Promise?”

Jamie drew a hair away from her eyes. “Promise.” Her expression creased. She would not let herself slip over the verge of tears, though, not when Dani was looking at her like that. “For as long as you need.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!! All queries, comments and general relief from boredom can also be found on tumbo: @phoebe-fucking-bridgers
> 
> Out of curiosity, would any of you be interested in me starting prompts for this pairing to be sent in??
> 
> Stay safe <3


	2. In a Hospital Bed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw; this chapter deals heavily with mental illness and physical injury

The gardener had been no stranger to injury, least of all in the time before Bly. No matter where she found herself, circumstance seemed to carve out a way to get in another kick to the ribs. Violence tasted better when she was already on the ground.

Perhaps, Tamara had once told her, you seem to find yourself at the receiving end of pain because you are seeking it out. Do you believe that you deserve to be treated that way?

The gardener’s heart had been quiet in her chest all day. If anything, she had felt closer to settled when there was a bandage around her arm. She could have sworn she was moving through shallow water.

Because once they had hurt her – aired out all of their grievances and seen through her many wrongdoings – then there was nothing they could do to hate her, nothing they could offer but love.  
A fucked up way of looking at things, she knew that, crossing the grounds of the manor that morning, but she had been young and shining and still demanding there must be an explanation for each thing that passed.

What did she have now, she wondered, something that was not quite contentment but neither was it hell. The only reason she had found back then had been sticking it out even if it was only morbid curiosity to finish that particular story.  
Nobody deserves to be hurt, Tamara had said. Not even the worst ones. And you, Jamie, are far from the worst thing in the world.

That particular mantra ran long her skin at night: not the best but not the worst either. Her tenacity saw her through. There were bleeding mouths and blue knuckles still to treat. And it had been a good couple of years since she had suffered anything more than wear-or-tear.   
In the end, it was not even the catastrophic devilment of ghosts in the walls that had caught her off guard, only one wrong step that made her a crooked mess under the shower with two cracked ribs and a bruised shoulder.

“Fuck me,” she breathed, spitting out water. Some things would not let her forget so easily. The nurses at the nearest walk-in did not diagnose amnesia, either.

Jamie would not let such things deter her. Perhaps sensing her arrival, Owen was waiting outside the manor against his car bonnet. 

“Jamie, what on earth are you doing here?” he asked. “Did you walk in?”

“Can’t exactly drive right now.” She winced through her shrug.

There was at least a foot of snow on the ground, making her body tremble.  
Not that she would have admitted the journey in had been nothing short of agony. Each movement sent a tremor over her side, a lashing of remembrance for her past sins.

“Get inside, love. The grounds dead, anyway.”

Jamie shook her head and made for the greenhouse. She was not going to let the December chill claim another one of them. Not while she was still standing.

When her perseverance died it was with a small gasp of posthumous revelation. Hannah found her against the greenhouse glass, shaking in the spilt soil.

To her surprise, she only knelt down beside the woman. “Jamie,” she said, taking her hand. “Why don’t you just let us help you? You don’t have to do everything yourself anymore.”

Jamie dug her fingers into her jeans. She ran her hand under her nose with violent carelessness. While she might have lightened the heart of the au pair with the tale, for most of her days she would rather be caught dead than where she so often found herself, crying on the floor of the greenhouse. She must have looked like a kicked dog curled there.

“Why don’t you stay here for a while, to let your body rest?”

“Not what I’m worried about,” she spoke after a while. Jamie felt along the seam. She swallowed the urge to pinch the skin beneath it.

Hannah smoothed down the material of her jacket. “All the more reason you shouldn’t be alone.”

Although the gardener was not one to speak of her medical history, even she could not disguise the look she got in her eyes sometimes, the pain across the outline of her body that could not be hidden from the sunlight. Jamie shuddered.

Before she could protest, the au pair was in the doorway, pink-tinged and bright and wondering where they had run off too. “What’re you doing out here?”

“It’s fine, Poppins. Can still work, not a degenerate just yet,” she protested.

“Get inside, now.” Her teacher’s voice always gave the woman whiplash. She hoped her expression did not quite betray her surprise.

And that was how she found herself in one of the spare bedrooms for the remaining week, wrapped under blankets so she could not complain about the cold, her days more a blur induced from pain medication than not.  
Owen took her down to the village so she could pick up a few clothes and other pieces, but by the middle of the week she had torn through the books that had previously sat unread for a good year.  
She supervised as best she could the care of the grounds, but knew they would be better in her own two hands. More than anything, she missed the feeling of the earth that invaded her senses. And the further she stood from it the further she drifted into the anonymity of a sickbed. Jamie turned in her sleep. Gonna’ turn into a corpse at this rate, she thought.

At least the children, bless them, had brought up flowers to bring some life into the room. She refused any further help before she became completely inept. The gardener had not before been extended the courtesy of relying on another. Everything she had earned so far she had had to work for herself, even if it meant staggering along with two broken ribs.  
The bandages were cradling her chest like a lover’s arms. This feeling, she knew, this feeling was dangerous. Old habits died hard and so would she, apparently. She fell back into blissful unconsciousness.

Dani, for her part, had tried her best to keep the children quiet so that the gardener might find some rest. Flora had been overjoyed that she was staying for a sleepover, and Miles had dug out a gameboy for her to play when she finished reading – something Jamie put many more hours into than she might have admitted.

When she took the children up to bed, she would on occasion check in on her too, and find her already asleep with the console still in her hand. Dani would place it on the nightstand and turn off the light. The ghosts in the corridors watched her pass, worse than snooping neighbours.

Down in the kitchen, she had heard Hannah and Owen deep in conversation. Dani paused by the door. She never wanted to interrupt them even if they insisted there was nothing to interrupt.

“Tea, Dani?” Owen asked when she finally emerged.

“Please.” She took her seat at the table. “What’re you talking about?”

“Jamie,” Hannah told her. “She must be going mad up there, stuck in bed all day.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen her not at work. Remember Christmas Day?” he asked Hannah, who rolled her eyes.

“Well, she cares about her garden. You have to commend her for that.” Hannah picked up her mug. “I worry about her pride though, she still insists on washing and dressing herself, even making her own tea.”

“I don’t know about that,” Dani’s expression creased.

“What do you mean?” Owen reached for the biscuit tin.

“I just . . .” she shrugged. “From the way she was talking, I think she thinks of herself as a burden being here. Doesn’t wanna’ be a bother to anyone.”

The three of them were looking down at the table for a while.

“Maybe she’s just being a prude,” Owen broke the silence in the end. Hannah shook her head at him. “What? I’m sure she’ll call for Dani whenever she needs help of the sort.”

The au pair’s cheekbones were pink at the thought.  
Certainly, she chastised herself, she should not be thinking of Jamie as such. Not when they had only kissed once, by the bonfire, and the closest she had even come then to undressing her had been tugging on her jacket as if her life depended on it. She caught the tail end of Hannah berating him for meddling. “I would never,” he smiled over his tea.

It was Friday morning the next time she saw her. The bedroom door was ajar but not open, and Dani knocked before she went running in at her usual speed.

There was a gasp on the other side of the door. She pushed it open a little further.

Jamie was leant against the bed – her back to her – in only her jeans. Her hands were shaking over the strip of bandaging and she had broken the skin of her palms from her fingernails. Dani’s shoulder’s dropped.

“Jamie . . .” she closed the door behind her. “Just let me help you.”

“S’alright Poppins,” Jamie told her, not looking over her shoulder. “Nothing to see here.” But she had not finished closing up the bandages. One last breach of pain she still needed to steel herself for.

Dani circled around her, her face still with concern.

“Pervert,” Jamie huffed. She let Dani take the wrappings though.

The au pair felt under the edges with delicate hands. Jamie’s lungs seized at the contact. But Dani did not say a word, not when her hands grazed silvered lines over her stomach, not when the pressure on her chest became so much Jamie thought she might cry.

“There,” Dani said, stepping back from her. She did not fail to miss her eyes flicking over her bare chest. Jamie crossed her arms over her stomach.

The au pair took a shirt out of the wardrobe, the white cotton one that Jamie knew she looked good in, then went to brew them both tea.

“Tryna’ kill me, love?” Jamie asked but it came out ragged. Dani called her daft and wiped her cheeks clean.

The sky was no longer overcast that day. Sore from lying in the same position for so long, Jamie managed a trudge around the gardens to get some air and not a cigarette, of course, but she hid herself back behind the safety of the bedroom door before Owen could offer her dinner.

One inch of solid wood that kept her away from their knowing eyes. What if Dani had told them about her, would they think she was mad, would need to be committed?  
Jamie steadied her breath. She backed up onto the bed. Those bedsheets, she knew, were her only respite, a steel trap she had set for herself.  
Her body crawled back into its primordial state of being.

-

The au pair was not prepared to allow such a thing to happen. When she checked on her that night, Jamie had her back turned once again, and would not move an inch for all the world.  
The blank expanse of the room was easier to see. Within just four days, leaving it had become unthinkable. She drew her hands over her head.

Dani left her there, and the following morning, but by Saturday night she decided that if Jamie was going to be trapped there in her own, private haunting, it would not do for her to be alone. She put her hand on her shoulder. Jamie’s expression was hidden in the pillow.

“C’mon,” she said. “Got something for you.”

The gardener looked over her shoulder. A sigh left her body that seemed too heavy to make, too old for her body to have collected in just twenty-something years. How long had she been in the room for, she wondered. One of the many walls of the gravity well.

And then Dani, her own, wonderful Dani, took her hand.  
The bathroom was full of soft light. She had filled the bath up extravagantly high, and did not doubt it would spill over the edges when Jamie climbed in, but she could not contain the reverence of the space in something as clean as porcelain. She could have written pages on the walls there.

Instead, she stepped out a moment for Jamie to reclaim this single act.  
It may have seen innocuous to them, but it did not matter, because for days it had been a marathon, this undressing and redressed just to do the same thing over and over until the empty space in her head was worth shooting.  
Jamie was curled up in the water when she came back. The towels she had left lovingly on the radiator so they might be warm for her, and she had poured a whiskey out in celebration.

“I know you stopped taking your pain meds, and Hannah said you liked this, so . . .” She passed her the glass. Jamie turned her head on her knees.

“What’s this for?” she murmured.

“For getting out of bed,” Dani said. She pushed it into her hand.

The gardener managed to break into a small smile. She uncurled from her body to lie back for a while, as warmth entered her veins again. Not quite alive but certainly not dead yet.

And the steady movements that emanated from Dani’s hands slid down her own skin until she was sure she had shed it. The au pair washed her hair steadily, rending Jamie completely undone, as she gave herself up to the many years of exhaustive shouldering.  
What a terrible thing it was, Dani would ruminate, to bear having to be human alone. She felt the shape of her bones under her hands and what they had arranged together to make in all its exquisite loveliness.

The gardener held her knees to her chest while Dani knelt there in the water.  
She pulled her up to her feet long after the bath had gotten cold and she was not yet ready to be let go of. Dani wrapped her in a towel and fanned out her hair. She did not spend another night alone in the manor until she left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gamesboys didn’t reach the uk until 1990 unfortunately :’ 
> 
> Thank you for reading me project all over the page!! As always comments go a long way 
> 
> Hope you stay safe lovely people <3


	3. Eyes of a Beast

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> emetophobia tw

When the woman awoke her little brother was still in her arms, clutching onto her with all the madness of an animal certain it should survive. His body was as feverish as it was undetonated. And her arms, no matter how they tried, could not contain him.

The gardener found she had left divots on the bedsheet again. Her body was humming from the evidence that she was there, a living creature, a statement of inconsolable evolution.  
A chill ran over her.

Outside, the steady rainfall was making the windows weep and set the fire escape up for catastrophe. Their room – wonderful and quiet and shelved by hardbacks – slept on undeterred. Jamie had been training ivy to grow over the doorframe. A little arch to a stolen sanctuary, they thought of it.

Dread was a thing that lived in her stomach: real and potted by incorrigible hands. What was growing in her lungs would not cease.

And then Dani’s hands were on her bare shoulders.

“Jamie?” The world righted itself by a degree. “Oh, baby, it’s okay.”

Rather than turn her, she hooked her arms around Jamie like she was something worth protecting. The gardener reached back to run her fingers through her hair until her breathing stilled.

“Wanna’ talk about it?” Dani murmured against her.  
She left a love-letter of a kiss on the back of her neck. Her mouth was the meeting of two horizons, she knew, scoring the flesh it found there at dawn.

Jamie shook her head with a passion.

“Wanna’ stay like this a while?” The au pair was fighting to keep herself awake. Jamie licked her lips and tasted seawater.

“S’alright. Get some sleep, Poppins.”

But when Dani laid back down she took the gardener with her. They shattered like sea glass against one another.

Sleep evaded her day after day. The colours she bore around her eyes were noticed only by the other insomniacs, wandering through the noontime light with no certainty of where they stood.  
Even the rhythm of Dani’s chest could not cure her with its predictability. Not when the thing in her stomach had reached a hand up the inside of her throat. She had left a shine of fever on the au pair’s chest.

Jamie bolted to the bathroom.  
Those were the nights that came for the both of them; in which she would find Dani stood at the end of the bed with the beast holding a mirror to her eyes; in which Jamie would brew tea and read aloud in her delectable tone to carry her to a gentler reality; in the nights where history came for every inch of her body and the things she had done to it.

They each had their own jungle of a kind – an empty woodland, a taiga, an everglade – and the things that lurked inside of them. But the thing following her through there would not catch her yet.

Her au pair found her on the bathroom floor. Jamie was holding her own hair back and her legs were shaking. God, it had not been this bad in a while. She passed her some water to get rid of the taste.

“What ya’ thinking, Poppins? Sexiest thing you’ve ever seen?” She smiled as another wave hit her. Dani put her hand on her back until there was nothing more to bring up.

“Drink some water for me, Jay,” she told her.

The gardener brought the first mouthful back up, but after that her insides seemed to quell and settle with lukewarm distaste.

“That better?”

Jamie nodded.

“Must have been bad,” Dani murmured. She had her fingers on her knee and was running them down the slight depression just below them. In the beginning that feather-light touch used to make her flinch with a violence. As the weeks turned to years though, she found herself softened by her honeyed skin, her discoloured stare, until she even walked around the house without covering them up.

“Something like that,” Jamie said. “I’m fine now, honestly, you don’t need to stay up ‘cus of me.”

Dani leant forward and pressed a kiss to her bare leg. Her gardener felt scalding to the touch.

“Can’t stop me so fast, doll,” Dani said. Jamie huffed, her back against the tiles.  
Dani had only started using the nickname after she told her how much she hated it, especially from men trying to charm her in her own damn shop. It sounded decidedly better coming from the au pair, although she did not seem to realise the full effect it had on the other woman.

She took Jamie hand in hand to the kitchen, where she force-fed her ginger snaps for the nausea and poured out peppermint tea.

“You can’t go wrong with that, surely?” Jamie asked. Some of the colour had thankfully returned to her cheeks.  
Shivering in her shorts and skinny vest top, she pulled at tartan blanket around her shoulders. The television was playing an old black and white film neither of them had heard of.

“Want me to turn it over?”

Jamie shook her head. “Leave it on.”

It was not to her liking but she knew that Dani would, and that was greater comfort still somehow. Like when she played her favourite records when she was not in the flat with her, even if Jamie told her she could not stand them when she returned.

The beast was not the only thing in the jungle that night: they had flowers growing there, birds to come in the morning, watchmen with lights, their children too. For them, that could be enough. Enough until the forest fire came with all its horror and decades later an entire new world could not remember the scent of ash but for the lines of the river bank. Dani ran her hand over the stripes on her upper leg.  
No thing was built to last, the gardener knew, but its life did not depend on its own ending. And that was the fiercest relief, knowing that she would count her years to pass until whatever it was found her, and all along they were only counting the beast’s too. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!!


	4. O Willow Waly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> song rec: https://youtu.be/6zpWBA9hc4k  
> tw; major character death

The first thing she knew without any doubt in her mind was that she had not awoken in her own bed. The room was too bright and the windows not fully closed, and when she buried her head in the pillows they smelt of pressed violets. Jamie laid on her back.

This was not the place she had fallen asleep in the night before with her door ajar and one eye open, waiting as she did like a beast for her love to come through the door. That body, burned and love-kissed, was the only memento she had to leave behind for the scorned world. What was it that they said, that they only lived as long as the last person who remembered them? Somebody might remember them though, in another time.  
It did not matter to the gardener. This space she resided in was her own, was for the both of them and no other voyeur could ever touch that.

When she got to her feet she found she was wearing the old brown flannel she had worn that last day and kept in the back of their drawer every one since. It had been a small thing, folding it up and crossing the sleeves but it felt like a lifetime screaming back at her.

Jamie crossed the manor bedroom to the chest of drawers and pulled out her old jeans she had not worn since leaving England. But there she was, back again, not a day older than her last with the au pair sleeping beside her.  
A few strands of her hair had turned grey and she had half expected Dani to tease her mercilessly about it, but her love only ran her hands gently through her hair, called her refined and pretty and a thousand other things that greeted her body like she was walking into the first sunlight.

Jamie shuddered. The recognition of her death did not feel as it once might have – racing down the street at seventeen burning so brightly as she stumbled against that imperceptible darkness – but rather like watching an old friend walk away and knowing quite sincerely that she might never see them again, and loving them just as much tomorrow.

The sunlight shifted.

She had died and she was brought back here because even in death, nobody ever did leave Bly. The gardener wrenched herself away from the window and the view of the grounds with a breathless hope in her chest. Her shoes were waiting for her by the door.  
She walked through the old wing and it was as she remembered, cloaked in dust cloths but free – finally – from some persevering sadness that had demanded it’s haunting.

The gardener went out onto the parapet and lit a cigarette she did not know she was holding. It tasted a little different, as if it was only a memory strung up from the lining of her lungs, and it felt right hanging there in her mouth.

When at last she came down the staircase it could not be denied: her years of unsteady ground and lovesick violence did not matter then, it was an unmarked gravestone above her mortal body. She had never been as certain as she was then for what she would find in the gardens.  
Dani Clayton was standing at the edge of the lake.  
Jamie had crossed the grass with the lope of a dog, stopping only to take a moment to watch her there.

Her arms were at her sides and her skin a soft gold in the morning light. Even with her back turned Jamie knew her expression was calm, blanker than the water she had died in, after so many years of love dedicated to reading the au pair’s movements.  
The nightgown was drifting around her knees. She could not have been cold though, this was not the place for the existence of warmth or winter, only the eternal summer, the promising skies, woven somehow between their minds to be a place they had always hoped would exist. None of them had spoken a word of it. And whatever God might have been listening had granted them this.

The au pair turned and saw her there; perhaps nobody else had ever been with her before. The gardener’s face broke into a glass smile.

“I saw someone . . . on the parapet,” Dani told her.

Jamie took her face, her hands shaking something wild, and pushed her hair out of the way.

“I can’t imagine,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” the au pair asked. Jamie had not even realised she was crying.

“Nothing’s wrong, it’s perfect, you’re perfect.” The gardener took her hand. “Let’s get you back to the manor, yeah?”

Dani followed her like a missing child. The au pair did not remember Bly or the circumstances that had brought them there, not the Lady of the Lake or even her decision to die. She could not remember her own name. The Lady was banished and she had taken that with her, leaving only the blueprint of her inhabitant behind, a house stood empty and missing of love.

And so Jamie told her pieces – the things that whatever it was that remained of them could bear – to bring the colour back to her blankness.  
The au pair drifted into her body. Something in the outline of her flesh must have remembered.

Jamie sat behind her when she laid down in the bath, her fingers in her hair, leaving kisses on her neck. The au pair sighed, harmless. She picked her clothes out in the morning or else knew that she would only pull on the same nightgown each time, until the au pair began to pick them one morning and did not look back. Sometimes she would pick something for Jamie to wear too.  
She was coming home to herself, she swore, piece by piece, room by room. They all did in the end.

“Jamie,” she asked one day. “What year is it?”

She eyes betrayed the complete and indisputable trust that had been born. The gardener wrapped her hands tighter around her.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, “it’s us.”

They spent their nights in unadulterated contentment. Not even breathing and she could feel the atoms at the edge of her skin hum against hers.  
What they had was not real and nothing there mattered and so to her everything in it mattered, everything of such blissful inconsequence and theirs in its entirety, until enough time had passed and so it was the au pair’s too, and they made the bed in the morning laughing like children and resurrected themselves with each moment they had ever spent together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that’s all folks!! thank you so much for reading 
> 
> it’s taken me a while to update because of work unfortunately but I’ll have more time now!! I hope you’ve enjoyed this and love hearing from you 
> 
> stay safe!! <3


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